


the Raven ate the Fox's eyes

by alwaysgoldbirb



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Character Study, Cheris/Khiruev (mention), Gen, Genocide (mention), Identity Issues, Series Typical Content, Suicidal Thoughts, fic as meta, spoilers up to Glass Cannon, suicide by you do it by killing a clone of the ghost that lives in your head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 22:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29125305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alwaysgoldbirb/pseuds/alwaysgoldbirb
Summary: Sometimes she drowned in 400 years of memories; a dead man's life crushing her like the airless depths of the ocean....Cheris-Jedao reflecting on who she is.
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Garach Jedao Shkan
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	the Raven ate the Fox's eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted more Cheris so I wrote more Cheris. I also wanted to dig more deeply into what her identity stuff might have been while carrying around a whole other person in her head.
> 
> Might come back and edit stuff later.

Sometimes she drowned in 400 years of memories; a dead man's life crushing her like the airless depths of the ocean.

It was mostly darkness. Silence. The absolute lack of sensation. No light, no feeling, no pain, nothing. No time. Just. Emptiness.

She'd gotten better at keeping away from the seemingly endless void of the black cradle, but the 40 years of life and many other memories of surfacing into an anchorage of undeath took up more room than all the memories of Ajewen Cheris, right down to the bone, the muscle, the instincts. Shuos Jedao was grafted onto her like she'd slipped into his skin, not the other way around.

In a way, she had. His reputation was a mask she wore, a weapon she wielded.

{ "I'm your gun," he had said sardonically to the Nirai technician - Kujen, she realized later - but when his life had scattered into carrion shards, and she had picked them up, she had held him as a gun and chosen to aim it at the hexarchate. }

{ The raven had eaten the fox's eyes.  
In so doing, had she become a fox? }

Is that what she had done - become a crashhawk, in a blaze of betrayal, burned Kel from her name and become Ajewen Cheris, only then to cloak herself in the corpse-memory of the arch-traitor; a desperate scavenger hiding a death by consuming it; a raven cawing in a fox's cry; a woman wearing a dead man's smile, walking with a dead man's gait, resting her once honest face behind the memory-facade of a liar and a conman and a mass-murderer.

Sometimes she felt like a puppet holding her own strings, fumbling through the steps left undone by an obsessive heretic in fox-hawk clothing, tugging herself left and right to the tune of a plan unfolding through a synaptic orchestra of memory and mathematics. And yet as much as she felt like a puppet on a stage, her cracked mind still conducted the discordant song, equations and experience reverberating into a calendar of consent, of choice; poised to fire across the hexarchate and bend exotics to its time and its practice.

{ And then there was Khiruev -  
Had they ever really had anything at all?  
Had it all been formation instinct, that twisted thing, contorting Khiruev's mind into a devotion that went beyond Kel Command - hit hard by simple proximity?  
Was Khiruev's devotion... was it to Jedao? To the idea of Jedao? To Cheris' impression of Jedao? To the man that was and wasn't Cheris, that was the memory that moved her mouth in Shpori drawl, guided her quips in sharp and friendly observances? 

Or was it, somehow, to Cheris? To the parts of Cheris that slipped through? Was she slipping through? Where did Ajewen Cheris end and Shuos Jedao begin? Was she really Cheris anymore? Could she ever be? 

Would anyone ever be able to love her? Or would they only ever love the ghost of a man she had woven into herself? }

Oh. She longed to rest.

Four centuries years of obsession crawled across her skin and gnawed at her mind tirelessly. 

She'd lost her family, her people, all in consequence of this pursuit of grander justice. If she had just let Jedao's cause die... if she had never taken up that weapon in the first place. { If she hadn't pulled heretical geometry out in a wasted effort -- heretical mathematics got her into this mess, and now she sinks herself deeper yet, as if a slippery hypotenusic slope had led her to her own heretical calender. } If she had never become a Kel. If she had just been content with her life and her people, not desperate for belonging in this same empire she now fought to destroy.

If she had just kept her head down; a bird of some form flying in formation, Kel or Mwennin, ashhawk or raven. Eyes on the ground, not on the all-seeing eyes of a fox. Maybe then she wouldn't feel her mother's voice and her father's stories melting into Shparoi words she couldn't understand.

In her heart was a hole the size of 58,000 souls screaming; slaughtered to punish her for carrying a mass murderer, slaughtered under the genocidal, cruel rule of a calendar her name carried the weight of in a number: a name that danced around heresy by marking the calendar day of her birth: the day her parents brought the ticking time bomb of their own demise into the world.

.  
.  
.

She feels relief with every pull of the trigger, every hole that blooms red on the false and fleshy (living, breathing) embodiment of a memory from a mirror.

It's killing him, and the him that is also her but isn't. 

{ "The bleed-through will pass," she remembers him saying. It was his deathwish then.

But it came back, and when she had held that gun to her head, had it only been him, or had it also been her that longed to squeeze the trigger? }

It's revenge. It's a suicide that's a murder. It's killing a fake version of herself, but she's a fake too. It's a mercy kill. It's bringing justice to a monster. 

It's an ending.

.  
.  
.

She feels the pull, a call, the need to rebuild, to reconnect. She is Mwennin and she caused this, so perhaps it is atonement to rejoin her people after burning down the empire she had left them for. The empire that had slaughtered them for her treason.

She takes the new name and the new face and the new, calmer life. 

Dzannis Paral teaches math to children. She keeps the memories of Cheris and the weight of Jedao as far from her as possible.

.  
.  
.

But the monster comes back and Dzannis Paral dies as soon as Ajewen Cheris fires a gun. 

Paral was always a paperthin mask over the electric instincts that were Cheris-Jedao, and maybe Cheris was quick to pull the trigger on Paral. Maybe she had made a habit out of discarding identities.

She would discard one again. Bent over, hurling onto the floor, Jedao spluttered out of her and Cheris breached the surface, breaking out of the cold and oppressive ocean of Jedao's centuries of pain and memories. Just Ajewen Cheris. And memories of memories.

Finally, she was free of Jedao.

{ The other monster that was also Jedao gagged as she shoved glass in to make him whole. 

She was free of Jedao, yes. And yet she had brought him back. }

Ajewen Cheris. Ajewen Cheris. Ajewen Cheris.

She could remember the past decade as if looking through a cracked and foggy window. Memories were like a puzzle assembled from pieces in the right shape but wrong picture; they fit neatly in their slot and yet were not meant to be there.

To remember herself then was to remember two lives at once, pressure-cooked in one body. 

And to look at Jedao now was to stare into a reflection she had made real.

She remembered being him. She remembered killing him. She remembered being tormented by him. She remembered carrying his bloody vendetta. 

{ "And - and thank you for the light." }

Jedao was a weapon she had wielded. And she had been his weapon.

He was a man who had made himself into a weapon, a ghost that hollowed out people to aim at his righteous cause.

She could have let him die. Let the shards of his memories crack on the floor, and the monster that held the rest starve on the slab.

But she brought him back, and she can look at him now, alive, not in her head.

{ "Now and forever, I'm your gun." }

He had turned her into a weapon. Lived, undead, in her head to steer her towards the ending she had wrought. She had pulled him out. And now he promised to follow her.

{ Could she even trust that he was being honest? }

Ajewen Cheris walked with her gun by her side.


End file.
